SfEP Conference, Oxford
Elizabeth Manning Murphy DE
Since I last saw many of you at the Canberra Society of Editors AGM
and the IPEd conference in Sydney, where my book Working Words
was launched, life has been hectic. I am currently in the UK, having
attended the 22nd Annual Conference of the Society for Editors and
Proofreaders (SfEP), sold the books I brought to sell and enjoyed the
last of a beautiful English summer. It is now well into autumn, with cold
nights, crisp days and trees starting to colour like the exotic trees in
Canberra. It’s a beautiful time of year.

The two-day conference on 25–27 September was interesting and
attended by some 150 members. It was held at St Catherine’s
College—a relatively new college dating from the 1960s, among the
‘dreaming spires’ of Oxford University—and was chaired by newlyelected SfEP President, Wendy Toole.

Join us for the
end-of-year
dinner
The last meeting of the
year for the Canberra
editors is our end-ofyear dinner. Read more
about the restaurant,
the guest speaker and
how to register and pay
on page 4.

Much of the conference looked to the future of aspects of the publishing
industry in Britain (and, by extension, the world) in the current climate
of financial crises in Europe, changing technology and learning to
cope with change. Opening the conference, the Witcombe lecture was
given by Angus Phillips, director of Oxford International Centre for
Publishing Studies, Oxford Brookes University. He referred to the old
learning method known as ‘sitting next to Nellie’, contrasting this with
the e-learning we are faced with today. There are new devices, new
platforms and independent publishing methods—teachers are only one
step ahead of students. Terminology is changing all the time too—we
have e-books and p-books (the latter being print books), enhanced
e-books with audio or video, ‘born digital’ meaning e-publication first,
and even ‘mooks’ which are hybrid book–magazines. It seems that
a PhD is becoming more of an education-level requirement in the
industry.

History and development of SfEP
Val Rice will be the Society’s guest speaker at its first meeting in
February 2012. Her talk will cover the history and development of
Society for Freelance Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP) from its first
meeting in 1988 to the present day.
Val joined the SfEP in 1995 and is now an Advanced member. She has
also been awarded the City and Guilds Licentiateship in Editorial Skills
(LCGI). She originally trained as a bilingual secretary at the Lycée
Français de Londres and worked as a secretary before training as a
teacher of shorthand and typing at Pitmans Central College in London.
Val taught business studies, IT and secretarial skills in secondary
schools and tertiary colleges. She also worked as an examiner for
Pitmans, the London Chamber of Commerce, the Royal Society of
Arts (now OCR) and Edexcel (London University) and wrote shorthand
speed examination passages for OCR. She ran her own secretarial
centre from 1984 until 1988 providing secretarial training, editing and
word processing services. She also worked with her husband to set up
his chartered accountancy practice in the same premises and acted as
his office manager.
In 1999, Val was elected to the committee of the Society for Freelance
Editors and Proofreaders and became treasurer in 2001. Following the
society’s incorporation and its re-launch as the Society for Editors and
Proofreaders (SfEP) in 2003 she became finance director and company
secretary.
She retired from SfEP in September 2007 and she was awarded
honorary membership. Valerie’s booklet—Starting Out: Setting up
a small business—was
published in 2006 and the
first in a series of SfEP
guides. She is now working
on the third edition.
Now Val concentrates
on copy-editing and
development editing but
spends as much time as
possible with her husband
and family, including three
grandsons. When she comes
to Australia she will visit her
youngest son and his wife in
Sydney and meet her new
granddaughter who is due to
be born in January.

Val Rice

SfEP Conference, Oxford (continued from Pg 1)
The lecture set the tone for much of what followed. I attended some
workshops and a seminar that focused on change: first, the influence
that social media and networking are having and can have in future
for editors and others; second, an introduction to some of the new
devices such as Kindle, Android tablets and smartphones (would
you really want to read a book on one?); third, some thoughts on
proofreading and editing on-screen, including marking up PDFs,
websites and e-books; and a seminar that gave an overview of
the digital publishing climate, including illustrations from a book
commissioned specifically for the iPad (Solar System), which was
spectacular.

Other topics included software editing, marketing your services, editing fiction, indexing, rewriting,
managing the stresses of being a freelancer and copyediting for digital media.
I was given time on Day 2 to tell delegates a little about IPEd, which was well received, with a
number of enquiries and suggestions afterwards for closer links between IPEd and SfEP.
Apart from the informative sessions, the conference was notable for great networking, excellent
meals and a very productive marketplace at which Working Words caused considerable interest. The
next SfEP conference will be in the ancient city of York in September 2012. We can look forward to
a talk about SfEP—its history and where it is today—from Val Rice, an Advanced member of SfEP, in
February.

Hilary Cadman
I also attended the SfEP conference and, like Elizabeth, found it a fascinating two days of meeting
fellow editors, attending some excellent workshops and seminars and eating fabulous food (St
Catherine’s is renowned for its meals).
I particularly enjoyed a workshop entitled ‘Keeping on keeping on’, described as ‘a highly interactive
session for freelancers who have been working for themselves for several years’. It was good to hear
from Melanie Thompson, the workshop leader, and the other participants about how people keep
themselves motivated and deal with issues such as marketing, networking, training, professionalism
and self-management. There was general agreement that Twitter and LinkedIn are the social media
tools to use for work, with Facebook best reserved for personal use. The session prompted me to set
up a work-related Twitter account and use it to ‘follow’ some of the science editors I met in Oxford.
Also useful was the workshop ‘Proofreading on-screen: the way forward?’ led by Anne Waddingham.
The main focus was on marking up PDFs using Adobe Reader X, which is free and has a wide range
of mark-up tools. One issue is that sometimes the mark ups don’t show up particularly well onscreen, e.g. the insertion mark is a small blue arrow that doesn’t stand out well against the text (as
shown in the figure below). As a result, designers often miss some of the changes on a marked-up
PDF. What I learnt from the workshop was that the changes can be viewed as a list of ‘comments’ at
the side of the screen. Each comment can be electronically ticked, as shown below. In future, I will
ask designers to tick each comment as they deal with it to ensure that they pick up all the required
changes.

Finally, Anne Waddingham mentioned a free on-screen ruler (available from <http://www.
arulerforwindows.com/>) which can display as a ruler or a reading guide. The ruler can be used
with graphics to quickly and easily measure objects on the screen, whereas the reading guide is
useful for working through a document on-screen line by line.
The user can easily switch between the ruler and reading guide modes and can choose different
‘skins’ – the default is wood grain, but also available are stainless steel, transparent plastic and
yellow. It is also possible to vary the ruler’s length, the orientation and the placement of markings.

November 2011 The Canberra editor

3

November meeting
President’s report
From the editor
4

End-of-year dinner 2011
Ethiopia Down Under, Pearce
Wednesday 30 November, 6:30 pm
We will celebrate 2011 with our end-of-year dinner at Ethiopia Down Under at the Pearce shops. On
offer is a generous sampling of everything on the menu. Vegans, carnivores, palates spicy and bland
will all find something they can enjoy. Coffee, roasted onsite by the restaurant, is also included.
Wine-writer Chris Shanahan is to be our after-dinner speaker. Chris is a writer and editor who has
specialised in wine selection, marketing and communication. After 30 years in liquor retail, Chris
joined a government agency where he has edited for the past few years. He has been The Canberra
Times’ wine columnist for 26 years and its beer columnist for six.
Cost: $27 (includes a glass of champagne on arrival, but BYO all other alcoholic drinks). Dessert
optional for about $10 extra (payable on the night).
Please RSVP online at <http://www.editorscanberra.org/dinner-2011/> and pay by 28 November.
Canberra Society of Editors
Community CPS Australia
BSB: 805 022
a/c: 0342 3503
Description: your last name AND the word ‘dinner’.

Gil Garcon
The November general meeting and dinner is a good opportunity to chew a
committee member’s ear about what you want the society to do and consider.
Come along and tell us. The committee is the workhorse of the society, but
it is your society and can achieve its objective for you only to the extent that
you interact with it, its committee and your fellow members.
Another way for you to share your professional opinion and knowledge is to
write a piece for the newsletter. That’s what it’s there for, and the livelier the
views and debate, the better the experience for all of us. You’re an editor, so
you can’t be word-shy. And you’ve got the whole summer to draft something.
Until then, I look forward to seeing you at the dinner. Chris Shanahan will be quite entertaining and
the restaurant offers an epicurean experience that is great value for money.

Correction to email address for the treasurer
In last month’s issue of The Canberra editor, the email address of our treasurer, Tracy Harwood, was
listed incorrectly. Her correct email address is now against her name. We apologise for this error and
any inconvenience it may have caused to members who tried to contact her.

October review of the Standards
At the Society’s general meeting in October, members discussed the draft revision of the Australian
Standards of Editing Practice (ASEP). The outcomes of this meeting are contained in the insert of this
month’s newsletter, and can be found as a PDF on the Canberra Society of Editors website.

The Canberra editor November 2011

October and the ASEP review
A discussion about the draft revisions to the Australian Standards for Editing Practice
(ASEP) was the focus of our October general meeting. With only a dozen or so people
there, we decided to restrict discussions to practical, high-level issues rather than
spending time in the detail of individual points. Ted Briggs, who was part of the group
who wrote the draft revision, provided valuable background. Martin Holmes took notes of
the main decisions.
Structure
Our first (and longest) discussion was about the proposed changes to the structure (see
table). The draft follows closely the Canberra Society of Editors’ Commissioning Checklist,
which some believed to be widely used throughout Australia. There was some debate
about the merits of this approach, particularly the overlap between substantive editing
and copyediting. It was also noted that the Commissioning Checklist may not be as
widely used as we think and might change in the future, for example by introducing a
task called ‘Style Editing’ to deal with repeated requests for quotes on this task.
Participants supported a separate section on verification because it would be helpful to
identify that this is a distinct task to employers and clients.
There was also discussion about whether the ASEP should seek to duplicate the function
of the Commissioning Checklist.
Overall, there was strong support for the draft structure, but not without reservations.
Knowledge (the Canadian Standards)
IPEd had asked whether a section on knowledge should be included. This led to a
somewhat clever argument on the differences between knowledge and skills. The general
sense was that knowledge was embedded in the document – for instance, it is not
possible to ‘do’ grammar if you don’t ‘know’ grammar. However, some participants later
indicated that it is indeed possible to ‘do’ skills without knowing much at all – grammar
used again as an example because of the vast number of Australians who believe they
can edit other people’s grammar despite their lack of formal grammar instruction.
The meeting concluded that there was no need for a separate section on knowledge, but
the reservations of some participants were noted.
Language
The meeting noted the use of active voice compared to the more abstract style of the
original ASEP. This is consistent with principles of plain and accessible language and
endorsed with little discussion.
New technology
One reason for revising the ASEP was to deal with new technology since 2001 and the
meeting discussed how well this had been covered. There was also a general sense that
ASEP should avoid relating to any particular technology because it will quickly date the
document. Section A3 of the draft covers new technology by implication and other
sections include new technology by example. There was a suggestion that ASEP should
try to use general examples rather than specific technologies.
Where to from here?
Many important issues were not dealt with, partly due to the amount of time we had. An
hour or so was simply not long enough. Some other questions that need discussion are:
·

What is the purpose of the standards? Compared with the original ASEP, the draft
has more emphasis on its use by employers, educational institutions and
accrediting bodies to assess skills of editors. Is this something you support?

·

Should the draft revert to the existing ASEP format and structure with minimal
rewording and simply incorporate any new information identified through this
process?
Do we need to hold a workshop to work through these issues in more detail?

·

Do we need to hold a workshop to work through some of these issues in more
detail?

The feedback I have had in emails and the poor attendance at the meeting suggests that
most Canberra editors are generally comfortable with the draft. There are comments
about some details which will be included in our response to IPEd.
Participants at the October meeting were asked to go through the draft and the current
ASEP and email comments back to me at <cathy.nicoll@atrax.net.au>. I would also
value comments from other members.
If there is enough support for a workshop, we would look at holding it in early February
2012. So please email me with your views. The Society can also email you a copy of the
draft.
Proposed structural changes to the ASEP
Original ASEP (2001)
A. The publishing process, conventions and
industry practice
A1 Overview
A2 Editing and proofreading
A3 Legal and ethical concerns
A4 Design, typography and formatting
A5 Technology relevant to editing practice
A6 Reproduction

2012 Residential Editorial Program
The seventh biennial Residential Editorial Program will be held at Varuna, the Writers’ House, in
Katoomba, NSW on 7–12 May 2012. This five-day program offers mid-career editors an exceptional
opportunity to develop their literary editing skills with highly respected industry practitioners.
More than 70 editors have participated and all confirmed an increased confidence and significant
improvement in their work.
Applications for the residential program will close on 9 January 2012.
Guidelines and application forms are available from the APA website, or by contacting Robyn
Sheahan-Bright, Program Manager, on (07) 4972 9760 or at rsheahan@tpg.com.au.

News from the Institute of Professional Editors Limited
September–October 2011
Ed Highley
The IPEd Council met twice during this period—on 7 September and 9 October. The meeting on 7
September was held in Sydney, just before the 5th national conference and was the first time that
councillors had met face-to-face since the previous national conference in Adelaide in 2009. The
October meeting was by teleconference.

Setting priorities
At the Sydney meeting, councillors took the opportunity to focus on planning for the next year or
so. They resolved that the highest priority activity for the immediate future should be the revision
of the Australian Standards for Editing Practice (ASEP). Kerry Davies AE, freelance editor and
president of the Society of Editors (Queensland), offered to facilitate the process and the plan she
put to council was accepted. Work began during October with society presidents, IPEd councillors
and Accreditation Board delegates receiving a background paper and supporting documentation to
allow them to convene meetings of their members over the next few months to discuss the revision
and convey their views to the facilitator. IPEd aims to have the revised standards published by the
end of June 2012.
Two other activities were accorded high priority: updating and elaboration of IPEd’s professional
development (PD) register and ongoing promotion of the profession. The PD register is a list of
society workshops and courses, run recently or forthcoming, which will form a training database
with the potential to be drawn on by all societies with IPEd support. If members of a particular
society want to host a training activity successfully conducted in another society, IPEd will—if the
presenter is able and willing, and other circumstances permit—provide material support for that to
happen.

2011 national conference
The biggest event during the past two months was the national conference held in Sydney. National
conferences are held under IPEd’s aegis and organised and hosted by the local society—in 2011
the Society of Editors (NSW). There were just over 300 participants in the conference, some
250 of whom were members of one of the seven Australian societies of editors, all of which were
represented. They enjoyed an interesting program framed around the theme ‘New horizons
for editing and publishing’. Six full-day workshops that supplemented the conference program
were well attended, with those on ‘Writing for the web’ and ‘Running a freelance business’ being
particularly popular.
IPEd made two presentations at the conference—one on developments since the last national
assembly; the other, by the Accreditation Board, on the results of its survey of preferences
for the future form of the accreditation exam. Two papers were prepared and provided in the
documentation provided to registrants: a special issue of IPEd Notes covering events over the past
two years and a report of the IPEd 2011 national survey of editors. Both papers are on the IPEd
website.

November 2011 The Canberra editor

5

IPEd’s 2011 AGM was also held during the conference. Despite an early start, it was well attended
and included members of all Australian societies of editors.
For an informative and entertaining account of many of the presentations at the national conference,
go to Jennifer Beale’s article in the September issue of Offpress, the newsletter of the Society of
Editors (Queensland) at <editorsqld.com> or via the IPEd website. There are also conference reports
in the October and November issues of Blue Pencil, the NSW society’s newsletter.

Overseas liaison
We are grateful to Elizabeth Murphy, a member of the Canberra Society of Editors and an IPEd
Distinguished Editor (DE), for making a presentation on behalf of the institute at the 22nd Annual
Conference of the UK Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), held in Oxford on 27 September.
In her presentation, Elizabeth covered the organisation of IPEd and how it differs from SfEP,
accreditation and the accreditation exam, recent and current IPEd projects, including revision of the
guidelines for editing research theses and ASEP, and ongoing promotion and advocacy. We hope
that Elizabeth’s presentation will help strengthen links between IPEd and SfEP to further matters
of common interest. Elizabeth’s report on the conference is in the November issue of The Canberra
editor, available at <editorscanberra.org/November2011/>.

New honorary treasurer
Josephine (Jo) Smith AE, Councillor for WA, has been appointed as IPED Council’s new honorary
treasurer. Jo brings extensive experience in accountancy and auditing to the position. She replaces
Ted Briggs, who retired from the position at the 2011 AGM after two years of sterling service.

Barbara Ramsden Award

Some data will be lost

At its October meeting, council agreed to continue its sponsorship and judging of the Barbara
Ramsden Award for excellence in editing, one of the national literary awards organised by the
Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW), Victoria.

6

Why XML publishing will need good editors
For the past two years, Dave Gardiner has been developing a single-source desktop publishing
setup using extensible markup language (XML). In this article, he outlines some quality and usability
issues which editors and publishers could expect when implementing the technology.

Introduction
XML is a text-based format used for publishing documents in several formats and is similar to the
more familiar hypertext markup language (HTML) used for publishing websites. It is one of the
formats of single-source publishing, in which textual and graphical content stored in one source
format is used to produce different output documents (e.g. PDF, HTML). Single-source publishing
covers unstructured authoring (e.g. Adobe InDesign, Framemaker) and structured authoring (XMLbased production).
I was exposed to XML when, as an in-house editor, I had to learn about markup – the different pieces
of text coding that are used to add meaning to content, such as ‘this is a paragraph’ and ‘this is a
section title’. After several months I began developing a desktop publishing setup.

Desktop setup
I obtained commercial software, <oXygen/>, an XML editor that allows users to format XML in a
similar way that Adobe Dreamweaver is used to format HTML content, and RenderX typesetting
software to produce PDF documents from XML.
XML is open-source, so I freely downloaded the stylesheets of the particular XML language I needed
(DocBook). Stylesheets are essential to produce output documents from XML—specifically, this
is extensible stylesheet language transform (XSLT), a variation of XML that, among other things,
The Canberra editor November 2011

creates pages, adds margins, headers and footers, places text and graphics in the pages, and
automatically generates page numbers and a table of contents. I started creating XML markup from
a scientific book that I had edited with MS Word and attempted to match the style of the published
book. I had to change styles in the XSLT stylesheets by customising existing styles with hand-coding.
I have found both advantages over conventional desktop publishing as well as shortcomings.

Developing XSLT stylesheets
XSLT is a complex programming language. Typically, you need to spend time modifying standard
stylesheets to get the output you want, such as formatting the text for chapter titles. It is not as
easy as, say, selecting a paragraph style from a drop-down menu. To change stylesheets (which are
text files) by hand-coding, you must understand how the logic of XSLT works and where to find, in
the hundreds of stylesheets, the specific lines of coding that change certain text formats. I started
working through an introduction to DocBook stylesheets and now, after two years of moderate effort
developing customised stylesheets, I’m at a stage of finalising basic formats for PDF, epub and web
pages.

Controlling automated production
Once you have converted a Word document into XML, it may take two to three times longer to add
markup and edit than a Word document, because you can only see the output of XML coding by
‘transforming’. The XML files containing the content, and the XSLT stylesheets that specify positioning
and styles of text and graphics, are combined. XML automates the production of documents using
preset rules about how content should be placed into pages. An editor can specify, to a degree,
how text and graphics should be placed and what text is to be hyperlinked, for example. After
transforming, the editor reviews the draft PDF and makes changes to both the XML and XSLT to
move text and graphics between pages, and transforms again. It is then an iterative process to
produce a near-final PDF.

Quality of PDF documents
The upside of automated typesetting is that many components of a document are generated from
the XML markup. The downside is that, with a complex mixture of multi-column text, figures, tables
and ‘sidebars’ (e.g. pull quotes or story boxes), there can be large areas of whitespace left at the
bottom of pages, or section headings can be separated from the following paragraph. XML cannot
automatically resize figures to fit into a particular space, so it places content into the next available
space, thus leaving whitespace where the figure would have been. If an image or table is too large
to fit onto a page, XML typesetting will delete that content and it will not appear in the PDF. It
is possible to lose parts of a document before your very eyes. This is why, with a basic desktop
publishing setup, there must be iterative transformations to refine layout through a ‘trial and error’
approach and to recheck that all material is present.

Solving problems of layout
XSLT stylesheets have some flexibility to set manual spacing, such as leading in body text and above
or below figures and tables, which can improve layout. Tables can pose difficulties. It is easy to
span a large, portrait format table across several pages with a repeating column header. It is more
difficult to span a landscape format table over more than one page because of limitations of current
stylesheet standards.
These formatting problems can be solved by splitting the content of a document into different ebook
formats – that is a strength of XML. For instance, complex tables and certain graphics can be output
into web pages and epub, while a PDF can contain mainly textual content. Visual (WYSIWYG) layout
of PDF documents is possible with some XML typesetting software with graphical user interfaces, but
users still must have knowledge of XSLT stylesheets to use this effectively.

Implementing the technology
An XML-based desktop publishing setup with reasonably decent stylesheets could be managed by an
editor with moderate skills in conventional desktop publishing. Alternatively, some desktop publishers
could specialise in XML typesetting and position themselves as document ‘finishers’. Software setup
costs are comparable to MS Word and reasonable page layout akin to a Word document (i.e. with
text wrapping around graphics) is possible.
Further information and resources about XML editing are at xmleditoz.net.au.

The next newsletter will appear in June 2011 and for
The next newsletter will appear in February 2012 and
that issue the copy deadline is 28 May.
for that issue the copy deadline is 23 January 2012.
The editor welcomes contributions by email to:
The editor welcomes contributions by email to:
<kerie1@optusnet.com.au>.
<kerie.newell@bigpond.com>.
All articles must be in .doc format.
All articles must be in .doc format.